November 20, 2007

I think the answer is "both." Reuters reports that drugmakers speaking at a recent health conference downplayed the idea that personalized medicine - which for drugs means pharmacogenomics - is just around the corner.

Pharmacogenetics is not going to transform this market any time soon," said Jean-Pierre Garnier, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

"Let's be clear -- it's going to take 20 years plus. Does that mean you are going to have zero happening? No. It's already happening. But it is going to be very specific examples."

I'm not that pessimistic. Not because the science isn't hard, because the science is mind boggingly difficult, but because I think there will be discontinuous leaps in advances - early going will be very difficult, I think, for the next several years, but then payoffs will start to take off as scientists become increasingly adept at merging discoveries and advances from many different fields like bioinformatics and pharmacogenomics.

Single silo companies like drugmakers (with a few notable exceptions) may be late in coming to this realization because they aren't, typically, places where this kind of fertile mixing of disciplines gets done.

But the future lies in mixing computer chips, test tubes, and pills and with the companies who can successfully leverage IP from these new combinations of diagnostics and treatments.

Another note in favor of these new chip-tube-pill combinations: products tied to a validated diagnostic platform will have a market advantage because they can prove specific outcomes for patients using them, as opposed to previous generations of non-targeted medicines.

Posted by Paul Howard at November 20, 2007 05:16 PM

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